Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

I suspect it was intentional, and I suspect it was as directed by council...I raised it a number of times, both with council and with staff, and nobody asked "Oh, I'm not sure what you mean, oh that's a good point" no...instead of engaging as they did for other questions they always quickly shushed it down, and ignored the question.

So I figure they were told, we're not going to pass this, downplay it please so the story is better when we do the thing that the study says doesn't work.

What I find weird is that I don’t understand the motivation, even though you’re clearly right that they should have welcomed your correction, not to mention the follow-on that the percentage of trips prevented by impassable areas would have probably gone down even more.

I mean, there are similar questions, and I jump mostly to US politics when I think this, where it’s obvious that the answer is that the Senator’s donors don’t like the proposed policy and the Senator’s job is just to shut it down without being too excessively obvious about the conflict of interest.

But here, I just can’t believe that Big Snowshovel is giving campaign donations to our councillors to keep the crowdsourced sidewalk shovelling going.

I think it's pretty straight forward. Councils which raise taxes get replaced. This is the belief (rightly, or wrong, and I think mostly rightly) that councillors have. Therefore, only when there is no choice or when they believe it is worth the risk will they do it.

Now I take a more nuanced view, that councils which wish to raise taxes to fund something, must inspire and lead the public into supporting it. This I think is increasingly difficult in our increasingly conservative anti-tax anti-government society, but it is still possible.